There is no such thing as a UX Designer role

How do you design the experience?

You can design a framework or architecture but the experience is in someone’s mind and in their emotions.

UX research or UX analysis all make lots of sense but UX design does not, UX is in the emotions of the user not in a digital product or system. The experience is a reflection of these products and services, so claiming to design it is just idiotic in the extreme. UX exists as a delivery mechanism for usability, user research and business interactions as such it is a framework of many starting points to experience. These starting points are an experience but they are combined within the users perceptions, expectations and past experience to determine their experience. In digital we can’t define an experience for a user, we have to work at a group level (anthropological) to understand a group drivers, expectations and models of behaviour a good example of this is Experian Mosaic classifications.

The real point here is the breaking of the UX process in to sections. The practice of breaking the process is clearly done by people who don’t understand it.

I keep meeting UX researchers who are excited that I am recruiting UX people, but to me not being able to do the full process creates too many limitations on them as viable UX people. Apart from the obvious inability to pass critical information at role breaks, why should my clients pay for limited people when one competent UX person can cover the whole process?

Doing UX facilitation and research is the fun part and everyone wants to do it, analysis is quite complex if it happens at all, but converting the concepts from the analysis into features and behaviour is the critical component. Defining the interactive framework and delivering it through wireframes or interactive modeling is an architectural activity as it relates to creating multiple routes that enable different kinds of users to acquire information, products or services.

Essentially you cannot design an experience you can only open access points to having an experience.

Experience is personal to the user, so UX Designers do not exist.